How To Be an Interesting Austinite

Residents of this city aren’t just proud of being a little bit weird—we’re also proud of being quite well-rounded.

By Nicole Beckley and Robyn Ross

Published: February 25, 2014

Photo courtesy Eric Silverstein

(Where else does party conversation range from politics and philanthropy to SXSW panels and skateboarding?) Keep reading to get top-notch insider information from local experts on everything from building a chicken coop to creating a hit podcast to scoring a spot in the Esther’s Follies lineup. It all adds up to making you the most interesting Austinite on the block.

How to harness your creativity and promote your work
An Interview with writer and artist Austin Kleon

Kleon is the author of Newspaper Blackout, a poetry collection, and two books on creativity: Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!, out this month.

Develop a daily practice. Creativity is like a muscle that atrophies without use. To work that muscle, make sure you have a scheduled time and place to do your creative work. It doesn’t have as much to do with having large blocks of time as it does doing something repeatedly, day in and day out.

Be supportive first. If you’re not ready to put your own creative work out there, show the work of others instead. If you’re a writer, start by writing about what you read and championing the work you think deserves a bigger audience. What I found is that as I wrote and shared other people’s work, it seemed natural to then move into sharing my own.

Use technology to your advantage. Because of the Internet, you have the ability to gain an audience online and communicate directly with them at low cost. Everyone has a multimedia studio (aka a smartphone) in their pocket now, so you can let people know what you’re doing via Facebook, Twitter or your own website whenever you want.

Start a conversation. I recommend what I call a “daily dispatch.” After you’ve done your day’s work, go back and find one little piece of your process that you can share. If you’re in the early stages, share what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of a project, write about your methods. If you’ve just completed something, share scraps from the cutting-room floor or write about what you learned. A good daily dispatch is like getting all the DVD extras before a movie comes out.

Fast Fact: Looking for the best happy hour deal in town?

Find it where you’d least expect: Spec’s! On the second Tuesday of each month, head to the Spec’s at 4970 W. Hwy. 290 for free wine-tasting from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., where you can sip up to 20 different wines and snack on food samples from local vendors. BYO wine glass or buy a crystal Riedel glass for $10. Other Spec’s stores offer smaller versions of these wine-tastings, so check with your local shop for details.

How to learn a second language quickly and easily
An interview with Elizabeth Mack, Owner of Freestyle Language Center

Set your objectives. Do you just want to improve your travel experience, like order a ticket or a meal in a restaurant? Do you want to be able to meet a cute person in a bar and talk about interesting subjects? Or do you want to develop fluency for professional reasons? Know what you want to get out of it, because that will keep you motivated.

Put yourself in a dynamic social situation where you’ll use the language. We’ve been scarred by the 1980s high school classroom approach, where you’d memorize verbs and never actually speak that language. People still need to get a grasp on the structure, grammar and phonetics, but you need to connect that to a relevant social context. Freestyle Language Center provides opportunities five days a week to use a new language, including a Saturday conversation cafe, museum tours, wine tastings, book groups, poetry readings, film nights and a karaoke party in four languages.

Practice makes perfect. If you practice in a social setting three to five times a week, you can go from complete beginner to solid intermediate in a year and a half.

How to start a food truck or trailer
An interview with Eric Silverstein

Silverstein owns food truck and catering company The Peached Tortilla. He also co-founded Trailer Food Tuesdays, a monthly showcase of mobile food vendors at The Long Center, and just signed a lease on a Peached Tortilla brick-and-mortar location.

Decide if you want a trailer or a truck. A trailer is stationary, while a truck moves around. You can find a used trailer on Craigslist for about $25,000, or you can go to a custom manufacturer, which is more expensive. You’ll spend between $60,000 and $100,000 to build a truck. Research the permitting laws and regulations beforehand, because you’ll need to build your truck or trailer accordingly.

Offer a niche product. You likely already know what food you’re going to offer. With trailers and trucks, you can be more adventurous because the risk is a little lower. Spend six months to a year on recipe development. Really nail down your flavor profiles and food costs. But, inevitably, things change the second you open, because your customers will prefer certain dishes over others, and you have to accommodate that.

Treat it like a business. Starting a food truck or trailer is the same as starting a software company, a law firm or any other business. Put together a business plan, figure out how much money you need to get off the ground, make sure your financial model works and have a plan for where you want to be in a few years. Invest in a good website, logo and marketing. If you go into the food truck business as a hobby, you’ll fail. The people who treat it like a real job are successful.

How to Build A Chicken Coop
An Interview with Evelyn Nelson, co-owner of Austin Urban Coops

For the past four years, Nelson and her husband, Ron, have been building chicken coops in Austin. They got their start at the annual Funky Chicken Coop Tour, which is on April 19 this year.

Know the rules. You can raise chickens in Austin, but the coop must be 50 feet away from your nearest neighbor. Usually four chickens are enough to give you a supply of eggs every week. Rhode Island Reds are the most popular because their eggs have the look and feel of store eggs.

Design for your space and climate. If you have a small property, an A-frame coop is best. Those are about 5 feet wide and 6 feet long. Here in Texas, coops have to be built in a way that can handle heat. A galvanized metal roof is reflective, so it keeps the coop cool.

Get the right materials. We use cedar, because it’s robust and naturally a repellent for termites. We also use hardware mesh because it has a smaller grid, so raccoons can’t get their hands in there. We recommend that you remove about six inches of soil below your coop, put down hardware mesh all the way across its length, cover the mesh with soil and then put the coop right on top. That way, there’s no way for predators to come in from underneath. In total, you will need about 15 2x4s for the frame, 10 1x4s for the roof and doors, a roll of mesh and half a sheet of ½-inch plywood for the flooring, nest box and door. Both Lowe’s and The Home Depot have the supplies, or you can use recycled materials.

Start hammering. For specific instructions on how to build a chicken coop, search YouTube for a step-by-step video or go to the resource section at austincooptour.org. Just follow along, and you’ll have a chicken coop in no time.

How to Pitch A Panel Idea For SXSW
An Interview with Hugh Forrest, Director Of SXSW Interactive

For the 2014 festival, SXSW Interactive received more than 3,500 proposals through its online PanelPicker system, and ultimately selected about 700 for the festival. Here’s how to make your great idea stand out.

Have a title that is reflective. Make the title as descriptive as possible—and in no way confusing. If I was doing a YouTube session, for example, the title should be “How To Make A Great YouTube Video,” not, ‘This Is How To Make It Great.”

Think small. It’s much better to take a small, small aspect of the given topic and really go into significant depth, as opposed to trying to cover every single element of that topic in the space of an hour. In the YouTube analogy, a better proposal is “Mastering Resolution On Your YouTube Video.”

Focus on originality and creativity. You want to create a proposal that is a different approach to a traditional topic, or is a completely different and unique topic. Also, keep in mind that what happened last week in tech may not be relevant a week from now.

Proofread. You’d be amazed at how often we get a proposal that has typos.

How to recover from a blunder at work
An interview with Kathleen Lucente

Lucente is founder and president of Red Fan Communications and has advised clients including JPMorgan Chase and IBM about communication strategy.

Be cautious. With the casual nature of texting and emailing, it’s easy to make a mistake. When you type in an email address, your computer usually automatically fills in the address. So if you have three Amys or five Sandras in your life, it’s easy to accidentally email the wrong person. If you have an important email to send, it needs to be drafted and reviewed, and only then should you add the recipients’ addresses in a very deliberate way.

Acknowledge your mistake. If you do send an email that hurt someone’s feelings or caused a problem, you have to own up to it. Deal with the ramifications immediately, talk to your boss and come up with a game plan.

Place a call. We’ve gotten to the point where people lean too much on email for conversations. Things can be taken out of context. My philosophy is that everything I write down should be able to be read by anyone. And if there’s a private conversation that needs to happen, I pick up the phone.

How to Protect Yourself From Identity Theft
An Interview with Bob Dooling, founder of Dooling Information Security Defenders

Before Bob Dooling founded his own company, he was breaking into the systems of Texas state agencies—with their permission, of course. Since 2000, he’s specialized in information security, gathering tips for how to keep your information safe.

Protect sensitive data. If someone’s going to actually steal your identity, they need quite a bit of information about you. They need your full name and mailing address, they likely need your social security number—or at least the last four digits—and typically your mother’s maiden name or something along those lines. Keep all that information under lock and key—not in your wallet or in an unprotected file on your computer.

Change things up. Use a different browser for blogs and news sites than for sites where you really care about security. For example, say you use Internet Explorer 4 to read blogs and you pick up some malware there. Then it’s more difficult for the malware to talk to your bank security if you’re logging into your bank only on Chrome.

Create strong passwords. Don’t think about it as a password, think about it as a “passphrase,” and string together a couple of words that mean something to you. An 18-character password is significantly more difficult to crack than an eight-character password. Also, there are quite a few good password management applications now, where they store all of your hundreds of passwords in one place—and you only have to remember one password. I use KeePass, and LastPass is also very popular.

Fast Fact: Want to get buried in the Texas State Cemetery? Good luck.

The cemetery is the final resting place for about 3,350 Texans who have left their mark on state history. To qualify for a plot, says Will Erwin, the cemetery’s senior historian, generally you have to be an elected state official or a member of the legislature—those folks automatically qualify. Or you can be someone who’s made a significant contribution to Texas history or culture, like Darrell K Royal, who is buried there, or the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who has reserved a plot. There is a three-member board that meets quarterly to vote on applications. “It doesn’t hurt to get letters from your elected officials,” says Erwin.

Fast Fact: Score a Spot in Esther’s Follies

The longest-running comedy venue in Austin has twice yearly “cold-call” auditions. Each one gets about 50-plus applicants for one or two spots—tops. And only about 20 people are called in to audition. What is Esther’s Follies looking for? According to co-founder Shannon Sedwick, they want “all-around comedians who can write, sing and do comic characters.”

How to Skip the Line at Franklin Barbecue in four easy steps

Step 1 Know that you have to order at least 5 pounds of meat, so get a group of friends or coworkers together—or plan a party.

Step 2 On the first of the month prior to the month of your party (i.e. March 1 for April orders), go to franklinbarbecue.com/preorders/ to see the calendar of what dates are available for you to pre-order meat.

Step 3 Email your order in to franklinbbq@gmail.com.

Step 4 On the day of your event, stroll right by that long line, and pick up your delicious meat feast promptly between 10:15 a.m. and 10:35 a.m.

How to create and keep a new habit
An Interview with Art Markman, Ph.D

Markman is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas and the author of Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others.

Be positive. We are habit creation machines, because we create habits whenever we repeat an action in a specific circumstance. The hard thing isn’t to create habits, which you can usually institute in 60 days or so, it’s to change habits.

Figure out your obstacles. If you want to exercise more but you haven’t been able to do that, there must be something getting in your way. Are you not leaving work in time to get to the gym? Have you not found an exercise you enjoy? When you know what the obstacles are, you can plan for them.

Make it a can, not a can’t. When we’re trying to develop a new habit, we often do it negatively: “I want to stop smoking, eat less or quit biting my nails.” The problem with those negative goals is you can’t learn not to do something. If you want to eliminate an action, first spend time observing your behavior. Up until graduate school, I bit my nails, and trying to stop biting them never worked. I discovered I bit my nails when I was sitting at my desk reading or working. So I developed a plan that I would start playing with a desk toy instead. Now, I have a habit of playing with desk toys, but I haven’t bitten my nails in 30 years.

Involve others. Give your family permission to nag you about your bad habit. Have a friend you can call when you’re tempted to skip the gym. Enlist other people to help you develop these behaviors, rather than assuming it only counts when you do it all by yourself.

Fast Fact: Did you know the Texas State Capitol has a cool echo?

The whispering gallery effect of the main rotunda in the Texas State Capitol allows you to clearly hear the echoes of your voice. For the full effect, stand directly in the center of the rotunda and loudly say a short word or clap your hands.

How to Create Your Own Signature Cocktail
An Interview with Larry Miller, Bar Manager of Péché

For two and a half years, Miller has been dreaming up new cocktails for Péché, complete with fresh-squeezed juices, housemade ingredients and absinthe.

Start tasting. Think about your favorite cocktail—is it sweet, sour, bitter, tart or spicy? That will be a big indicator of what your signature should be. Also, most people have a favorite liquor, whether it is gin, rum, tequila, vodka, etc., so those are your base elements.

Create balance. Let’s say you want a sweet whiskey drink. Start with the whiskey and add something sweet, like apricot or honey. Then you want to mix in something sour or bitter to balance the flavors. Finish with some kind of bitters to enhance the cocktail.

Keep it simple. My idea of the perfect cocktail is going to have three to five ingredients. Keep that in mind as you experiment. You’ll see a lot of people are doing cocktails with six, seven, eight ingredients, but some of the best ones I’ve created have had only three.

How to score a TEDx Talk
An interview with Nancy Giordano

Giordano is the founder of TEDxAustin and served as lead curator for the organization’s first five years. Plans for this year’s local conference are in the works.

Have an idea worth sharing. This is the No. 1 thing, whether it is an invention, a theory, a piece of research, a philosophy. It’s not a reflection of your job title. You could have a student whose idea is great, and a successful CEO who doesn’t have an idea worth spreading.

Think outside the box. The best talks share ideas no one else is thinking about, and that have a direct application—such that if more people knew about it, it would change the way we think or work. And good talks often have a layering of ideas. The talk may be about one specific topic, but there’s a universal theme in it. For example, David R. Dow’s talk is about the juvenile justice system and death row, and there is a direct takeaway about whether the system is broken. But there is also a bigger idea implicit about how to think about difficult problems in general—instead of breaking them down, scope them bigger.

Share, don’t sell. Giving a TEDx talk is different than delivering an academic presentation, a motivational speech or a pitch. It’s about sharing an idea, not selling it. And the best TEDx presenters really think about their audience. Brené Brown’s talk on the power of vulnerability is so successful because she had an idea that had an immediate application, and she delivered it in a way that was very accessible to her audience.

How to start a culture of philanthropy
An interview with Dan Graham

Graham is the CEO of BuildASign, which makes signs and other custom-printed products. He sits on the board of Caritas of Austin, Citizen Generation and more, and his company employs seven full-time employees focused solely on philanthropy.

Find your passion. If you need help deciding where and how to give, start with organizations that connect the community with nonprofits and their needs, such as I Live Here, I Give Here or Greenlights. These organizations will help connect you to a nonprofit whose mission is in alignment with your passion.

Identify your resources. I always encourage donating your talents or professional skills. For example, some nonprofits are in need of a new logo design, website or graphics. Any professional help you can provide is truly valuable.

Think big. Usually, finding the time to volunteer is the hardest part of volunteering. Consider getting co-workers involved, as well. Most companies can do things like offer their employees paid time off to volunteer, hold donation drives or make their office space available to host community events and other functions.

How to Become A Voice-Over Actor
An Interview with Shannon McCormick, professional voice actor

In Austin, voice actors have the opportunity to work on video games, commercials and animated series. Here’s how to score a gig.

Work your voice. People who have a particularly distinct or sonorous voice are at an advantage in voice-overs, but it’s really more about what you can do with your voice and what directors are looking for. Not every role requires a movie trailer kind of voice.

Mix and mingle. You must network, whether that means taking acting, improv or voice-over classes or going to film mixers. Most of the gigs that I have gotten have been through referrals.

Be easy to work with. If you can give different kinds of readings based on a director’s feedback, that’s going to serve you well. Give them a different flavor, a different spin on how you’re reading a line. On top of that, be on time and always be professional.

Fast Fact: When’s the best time to go to Whole Foods downtown?

The short answer is Wednesdays, because you can get both last week’s and this week’s sale prices on your favorite goods. If you want the shortest checkout lines, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. or 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. are your best bets.

How to Create A Hit Podcast
An Interview with John Rubio, Host of The Beerists

Before they won the Podcast Awards “Best Food and Drink Podcast” in 2012 and 2013, The Beerists were just a group of friends talking about the thing they were most passionate about—beer. Two years later, more than 85,000 people download their show each month to stay informed and entertained about brews.

Pick a passion. Start a podcast because you like whatever you’re talking about. The reason that I started doing this is because we had a bunch of friends together, and we just wanted to have a record of our tastings. I’d say go into it with no expectations.

Get the right equipment. We use four condenser microphones, MXL990s, in a room that is sound-dampened. If it weren’t sound-dampened, then I would have gone with dynamic microphones. Shure SMB58 dynamic microphones are the ones we ended up buying for our portable rig, so we can use those outside. Figure out what works for your situation.

Let your personality shine. When you’re in front of the microphone, there’s an intimidation factor. People will either clam up ortry to sound better than they normally do, which makes them sound stilted. I think it’s a matter of relaxing and being natural and funny.

Be consistent. We release four shows each month. I try to keep each one between an hour and an hour and a half now, but when we were building our audience, I tried to keep it under an hour as much as possible. The key is producing a good amount of new content to keep listeners coming back.

Fast Fact: Want to scale the Circuit of The Americas Tower?

It’s easy—tours are available Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Just hop on the elevator or brave the stairs to get to the top of the 250-foot tower.

How to Land An Ollie
An Interview with Elias Bingham, skateboarder and owner of No Comply skateshop

“The first basic trick in skateboarding is the ollie,” says Bingham. That’s where the rider and board leap into the air, hands-free.
Here’s how to do it:

Get a good board. People often go to Wal-Mart or Academy for their first board, but those don’t even roll. They don’t have ball bearings or plastic in there, which makes it really difficult to learn. I recommend going to a skateboard shop for your first board.

Find smooth ground. Tennis courts or parking lots are best when you are learning.

Balance on the board, crouch down and jump directly up. As you leap, “pop off the tail,” which means to smack the tail of your board on the ground. That’s what helps get you up in the air; it also picks the front of the board up at an angle. Your other foot helps pull the board forward with the grip tape, the sandpaper stuff on the top on the skateboard.

Stick the landing. The key part of landing with balance is keeping a bend in your knees. If you land stiff-legged, it’s easier to lose your balance and take a tumble.

How to Become A Roller Derby Girl
An interview with Stephanie Benitez, aka Flash Gorgeous, of the Texas Rollergirls

Before you lace up your skates and pop in your mouth guard, Benitez reveals what you need to know to get started in this physical contact sport. (Heads up: Try-outs are in October.)

Know the sport. A roller derby team is made up of jammers, who are usually small and fast, and blockers, who have to be strong. Also, get all the equipment you need: quad skates—no inlines!—kneepads, elbow pads, wrist guards, a helmet and a mouth guard.

Join in. Texas Rollergirls has premier leagues, four home teams and the traveling teams. Test them out, and see what is the best fit for you.

Build endurance. It doesn’t matter if you’re a jammer or a blocker—roller derby is 100 percent physical at all times. And we play two 30-minute halves, so it’s pretty exhausting. Working on your endurance via running, cycling or skating will really help your game.

Try your luck. An average of 80 to 100 women try out each year for about 10 spots. Just know we always notice the ones who work the hardest.